My "AMD Instinct MI50" mining-special edition compute card arrived. It's in fact a desktop Radeon VII card with the Instinct MI50 passive cooler and stripped-down circuitry (including omitting filtering and protection on the display port) for compute-only uses. After the end of mining, they can be found for $100 to $150. The GPU has 4096-bit HBM2 on package, providing 1024 GB/s of DRAM bandwidth, ideal for developing memory-bound partial differential equation solvers in single precision. For cooling, there are 3D-printed 120 mm fan mounting kits. #hpc
On the "mining-special MI50" (Radeon VII), I found its practical bandwidth usable by software is 750 GB/s, consistent with other benchmark results. For my FDTD kernel, simulation speed reached 3600 million cells per second. Curiously, this card's FP64 speed is around 6000 GFLOPS, much faster than I expected. It turned out that these mining-special MI50 are actually workstation Radeon Pro VII, not just regular Radeon VII, with unlocked FP64 and close enough to a real MI50. #hpc
@niconiconi I had been working on a supercomputer equipped with MI50 for 2 years and it can reach a speed of 200P. And if I'm right, the Radeon VII remained an expensive price even after its discontinuation because of its outstanding mining performance. How time flies...
@fulkrum@qoto.org Just search "Radeon VII" on Salted Fish